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Recommended
Reading for
Ecosystem Builders
New research findings may surprise you:
1-Any firm can be a growth company
2-Growth is almost always a temporary phase
3-Smaller high-growth companies are funded mostly by debt, not equity
Strategies for EDC Support to High-Growth Enterprises
How can economic development agencies foster the creation of more high-growth enterprises; what are the growth factors, and how can they be leveraged; what are the appropriate ways to provide such support? The spectacular success of several well-known new ventures in technological fields, which in little more than a decade have jumped from the state of start-ups to that of top international businesses, has pointed to innovation as a key factor in the high growth of firms. These high-growth enterprises often drive job creation and innovation, so policy makers are increasingly making such companies a key focus. Some new important research findings may surprise you: Any firm can be a growth company Growth is almost always a temporary phase Smaller high-growth companies are funded mostly by debt, not equity These and many more insights are summarized and analyzed, providing policy makers with ideas on how to power growth at the firm level. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/high-growth-enterprises_9789264048782-en.html
High-Growth Firms in the United States: Key Trends and New Data Opportunities March 2024
Using administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we introduce a new public-use database that tracks activities across firm growth distributions over time and by firm and establishment characteristics. With these new data, we uncover several key trends on high-growth firms—critical engines of innovation and economic growth. First, the share of firms that are high-growth has steadily decreased over the past four decades, driven not only by falling firm entry rates but also languishing growth among existing firms. Second, this decline is particularly pronounced among young and small firms, while the share of high-growth firms has been relatively stable among large and old firms. Third, the decline in high-growth firms is found in all sectors, but the information sector has shown a modest rebound beginning in 2010. Fourth, there is significant variation in high-growth firm activity across states, with California, Texas, and Florida having high shares of high-growth firms. We highlight several areas for future research enabled by these new data. https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/CES-WP-24-11.html
The Use of Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Small and Medium Sized Business Customer Journey Development
2023 will be known as the “Year of ChatGPT”, or more generally, the year that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) became widely available for general purpose usage to the public. This is of course true in the areas of focus for this case study: the sales, marketing, and customer journey process (Kshreti et al. 2023, He and Zhang 2023, Moser et al. 2023), as predicted by Perino (2023). For example, Jia’s (2023) experiment showed how AI assistance in the sales lead process increases the employees’ creativity during the customer interaction process, which was further shown to increase sales. By the end of 2023, dozens of new tools came into the market to accelerate marketing and sales efforts, specifically addressing: • Prospect research & list building • Data analysis & predictive modeling • Marketing automation • Multi-channel & social media marketing placement & scheduling • Search engine optimization (SEO) • Chat • Content development • Creative & design • Customer relationship management (CRM) • Event & meeting automation • Document & notetaking automation However, this new technology is not simply a plug-and-play that one can purchase off the shelf at Best Buy and use as one-size-fits-all. Dwivedi et al. (2023) performed experiments to show that the customer purchase journey is not enhanced simply by throwing GAI and chatbots at the problem. Careful design of customer-facing GAI is necessary to gain the trust of the customer, and the researchers specifically identified warmth as a feature which will increase the engagement and positivity in interactions with the customer.